Undergraduate

How to spell undergraduate

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce undergraduate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does undergraduate mean?

1. nounA university or college student who is working towards a first degree and has not yet graduated.
2. adjectiveRelating to study or students at the level of a first degree, before postgraduate work.

Undergraduate in a sentence

• noun

  As an undergraduate, she shared a cramped flat with three other students.

• adjective

  She finished her undergraduate course in three years and went straight into a master's.

• noun

  The library reserves a quiet floor for every undergraduate during exam week.

• adjective

  The university offers generous bursaries to undergraduate applicants from low-income families.

Where does undergraduate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on the Latin gradus, meaning a 'step' or a 'degree', the same root that gives English 'grade', 'gradual', and 'graduate'. A graduate is literally someone who has taken the step up to a degree, from the medieval Latin verb graduari, 'to take a degree'. The prefix under- here carries the plain native English sense of 'below' or 'beneath in rank', so an undergraduate is a student ranked below the level of a full graduate, that is, one still working towards a first degree. The compound appears in English university life from the seventeenth century, originally at Oxford and Cambridge. The spelling trap is mostly the buried middle: the unstressed -gradu- with its 'a' and the soft 'd' that sounds like a 'j', plus the long, unbroken string of syllables that tempts writers to drop a letter.

How the word is built

• under- (below, beneath)
• grad (from Latin gradus: step, degree)
• -ate (forming noun/adjective)